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I was out on my bike this weekend enjoying the first signs that Spring is just around the corner and doing my Sunday Morning thinking - It’s my time for clearing my head, noodling with ideas, taking the experiences of my week and looking for the patterns, seeing what crystallises.

I’m an eternal optimist when it comes to human nature; I prefer to believe that most people do their best, most of the time, but I’d be being less than honest if I didn’t acknowledge that I’m surprised how often my Sunday morning bike ride result in the same conundrums crystallising.

So what’s happening?

I believe that, in an enabling environment, everything is possible and each of us can achieve anything we really want to. The Turning Tides Project always seeks to demonstrate the application of that principle. If you underline the important bits of the sentence (like you were planning a piece of homework) the issues become clear:
In an enabling environment,everything is possible and each of us can achieve anything we really want to.
…there’s lots of important bits in this sentence. That’s why it’s easy to say and more of a challenge to realise.

Enabling Environment - Often the barriers we encounter at TTTP are about the attitudes and expectations of people without a ‘learning disability’ or ‘autism’ label. Mostly these attitudes and expectations are well intentioned and seek to protect those with labels from failure, disappointment, danger, looking foolish, making the ‘wrong’ choice. This desire to protect denies access to opportunity; it disables.

Achieving an enabling environment built on inclusion and equal access requires us all to ask ourselves some questions about the barriers we, as individuals, create and sustain:
What are they?
Why are we doing it?
What do we each need to change about ME to make that different?

Each of us can achieve anything we really want to - If the barriers that deny opportunity are removed, there might be some personal ones to tackle.
What do we each ‘really want to’ achieve?
Have we all been given equal access to the opportunity to decide?

Achievement isn’t a gift - Whoever you are, achieving the things you aspire to achieve is the result of effort, commitment, focus and tenacity.
Are we all encouraged to develop those characteristics?
Do we all have access to honest feedback?

I’m not sure it is complicated really is it? It’s simply a question of treating others the way you’d like to be treated yourself and that, for me, is the definition of RESPECT.